Disemboweling with Children! Part 1

I don’t do dissections.

I can’t really say how I’ve managed to teach biology for 7 years without doing one, but I have. Anatomy really isn’t part of freshman biology anymore, at least not by Illinois standards, and isn’t even part of a university degree in biology for the most part- at least not molecular bio, which is what most of it is these days anyway. A hundred scripts for corny high school humor flicks have it wrong- there are no more opportunities for ‘marked’ frogs to make a desperate bid for freedom by jumping out of second story school windows in droves.


I don’t want to be misleading. I’m not trying to say dissections aren’t done -plenty of teachers do them. Just not me.

Until now.

I have to, per my job description, do the dissections for Marine Week, notably clams for the third grade, squid for the forth, and sharks for the fifth grade. It has not escaped me, the irony of the prospect of being up to my arse in salty, slimy fishy creatures so soon after finishing Sex Ed. This promises to be a comedy of errors, not the least of the reasons being that I don’t do so well with the little kids. And the fact that they are, well, little kids.

They probably wouldn’t agree. I get along with them quite well, and they seem to really enjoy science lab, but possibly for all the wrong reasons.

The problem is, I don’t quite get the younger set. I’ve blocked out most of my elementary school days . This is called ‘selective memory loss’.

High school for me was marginally tolerable, for the most part. I didn’t really like it a good deal of the time, and anyone who ever reminisces on this era being ‘the greatest time of their lives’ is immediately suspect. I can’t say it was all bad- sure there were bullies and I got into fights, but at least by this age I fought back, and there were plays and band and opportunities to behave badly.

Elementary school was different. As I’d prefer not to think about this much, one salient detail will do the trick into explaining why I was a bit of a social outcast. At age six, I wet my pants atop the jungle gym surrounded by a crowd of jeering 1st graders.

Kids can be cruel. Reputations stick. Enough said.

The end result is, I don’t really know how to talk to them, especially from an adult perspective. I’ve cottoned on to some elementary school teacher techniques, but I am far from expert, and tend to mislay the emphasis. By emphasis, I mean that sing-song ‘Hello Boys and Girls and Good Morning To You!” – the painfully obvious stress that indicates that this is a cue to respond “Good Morning Mr. Bean!” This is the prescribed elementary routine.

And so, I’ve learned you have to be really obvious when presenting stuff, and use the contrived,

“Isn’t this AMAZING Boys and Girls?!?”

I just can’t seem to get the emphasis right. Take the owl pellets, for instance.

I found them while hiking. For those of you who have never had the privilege of pulling one apart, owl pellets are regurgitated lumps of animal parts that the owl cannot digest, mostly the hair, teeth and bones of rodents. They look conspicuously like turds, but in fact if you pull them apart, you can tell what the owl was eating, and even reconstruct skeletons. It’s pretty neat, actually.

So I brought them in, intending to show the little kids. I had my “I’m so Excited!” contrivance program on, but I jumped the gun- some circuit blew and so the emphasis came too early.

“So, Boys and Girls, did you know I went Hiking?!? And I found….these….

“HIKING!?!”, they wailed,

“He went HIKING!” Exalted they.

“I can’t believe you went HIKING!!” they extorted, giddy with excitement over the notion of actually walking somewhere.

To their credit, they are little human beings, and the synapse closed for some; after their initial exuberant response, a wavering of the eyes passed among them, wondering, perhaps, if they had been duped by The Voice. I can only imagine that this has happened before.

In addition to my Premature Voice problem, I can’t seem to grasp the notion that you really need to walk them through activities, lest they get themselves into trouble. I’m used to high school- you tell them what to do, and they get it done, or not. Consequences on them, at that age. It is occurring to me, though, that even the most prudent students will fly off the deep end, if not given explicit instructions to not flip out. Let us take, for example, the stream tables.

They are, in theory, a wonderful tool to observe erosion, river formation, deltas, all that good stuff. They are essentially a miniaturized version of all the various canals, reservoirs, castles and armaments you built at the beach when you were young. The trick here is that they are miniaturized- you can’t use sand, as the particles are too large, and so you need diatomaceous earth. This earth is finely pulverized, gritty grains of expired algae- the same stuff that gives your toothpaste its abrasiveness.

It works great in the tables, like miniaturized sand, and you can really spend hours playing with the stuff. What I failed to recognize is that, like sand at the beach, if you add small children to the equation, the stuff gets everywhere.

And by everywhere, I mean all over the children. 20 minutes into the exercise, they were howling, running cups of water back and forth from buckets, dropping it onto tables from heights of 6 feet or more- and these kids aren’t 6 feet tall, so you can imagine that this took some ingenuity- and slapping the surfaces of the diatomaceous earth, splashing it on themselves, the ground, their clothes.

Did I mention this is a private school?

Did I happen to let on that the kids wear uniforms?

Could you imagine how uber-wealthy parents feel about dirty school uniforms that they have to pay the maid overtime to wash and press?

Suffice to say, we had to stop the exercise, but the damage was done. The water dries, the powdery white earth will wash out of cloths, but when I lined them up with their backs to the playground wall to have a look at them they were coated- streaks of white on their cheeks, their sweaters, their hair, their skirts and their pants, looking nothing less than a line-up of 8-year old coke-habit-having third graders who had found a pile of blow 8 feet high and dove right in.

And now they trust me to give them knives?

I can’t say I feel like this is a good idea.

Nevertheless, let the disembowelment begin.